Dark Enlightenment

Richard Dawkins would surely not agree that Science is a point of view in need of balancing, but someone at Channel 4 obviously felt the need to offset The Root of all Evil last night with a follow-up factual programme with more positive spin on the bells and smells.

Inviting a frothing evangelist to celebrate the order, structure and moral purpose provided by religious belief would have been a bit flagrant, so instead they got an historian to do it. (And then hid him on More4)

Michael Burleigh's Dark Enlightenment argued that people have spiritual needs, and life needs to have transcendental meaning, otherwise society just falls apart (Cue images of bimbo binge drinkers flashing their tits.) Unlike that of Dawkins, Burleigh's argument didn't hang on whether religious belief is True; it's just the only way we have to "tell the banal from the intelligent," he insisted. (And on that basis, who cares?)

Burleigh's TV essay was shockingly partisan and would have had a certain appeal to former members of the Taliban. Empty consumerism − western society's endless quest for new varieties of novelty and sensation − was traced back to the rationalism of free-thinking philosophes like of Voltaire, Diderot and the man Burleigh insisted on calling Immanuel Cunt. Little does it matter to him that these men lived long before Imperialism, post-Imperialism, Modernism and Postmodernism and that many humanist thinkers today are equally appalled by the Society of the Spectacle.

After the French Revolution, a process characterised by Burleigh as one of unmitigated barbarism, secular society made use of bogus versions of "the same mechanisms" to pervert true religious aspirations and practices in order to create "a new symbolic universe".

He didn't stop to ask whether the revolutionaries' suppression of revolt in the Vendée was qualitatively different from the Church-sponsored crusade against the Cathars or whether their surrogate secular belief system was inherently less true, as opposed to just less well-embedded in cultural tradition; designed rather than evolved. Isn't the whole business of moulding people suspect, whether it is done by church or state?

Burleigh bewailed the moral confusion of our age − what Durkheim called Effervescence − and the fact that liberals no longer seem able to provide a plausible account of what Western civilisation actually stands for. Yet can one really be so sure that Hitler was simply a product of Germany's "spiritual confusion" and that relativism is what all forms of rationalism inevitably degrade into?

Personally I wouldn't swap binge drinking for public executions, bear-baiting, witch-burning etc. whatever the order, structure and moral focus supposedly enjoyed by the people of the middle ages.